Author: garywalker

A long awaited ordinance that will spell out in detail how murals and commercial advertising are separate could be heading to the Los Angeles City Council. The Department of City Planning is slated to recommend moving its final draft mural ordinance to the council Thursday, Sept. 13 after completing a nearly yearlong process of crafting a new municipal law that will define artwork and make the distinction between art and advertising. A staff report from Planning Director Michael LoGrande also recommends that the council adopt the ordinance that is being proposed. Councilman Bill Rosendahl proposed creating a new ordinance for mural art last year after hearing from many of his constituents in Venice, Del Rey and Mar Vista who have been pressing for such a law. The recommended ordinance would allow muralists to acquire city permits to paint or install their artworks and not be subjected to the regulation of the last decade. “The proposed ordinance updates Chapter One of the Los Angeles Municipal Code to establish new definitions for ‘original art murals’ to replace the old definition of a mural sign,” planning officials wrote in a recent report. “In doing so, it exempts new and existing murals from a number of requirements and prohibitions, which apply to murals regulated as signs. “New proposed administrative rule on original art murals to be implemented by the Department of Cultural Affairs...

A resolution to counter the Los Angeles Unified School District’s current policy on how the quality of a teacher is measured was postponed at the Sept. 11 school board meeting. Advocates on both sides of the resolution will now be forced to wait to weigh in on the resolution by LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer, whose original motion was slated to be heard June 12. That motion, entitled “Commitment to Honor Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century,” asked the board to recognize the importance of peer assistance and review for assisting and intervening when teachers struggle or need additional resources. The new motion asks the board to urge to LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy to use “a robust and diverse set of student learning instruments, including both state administered exams and authentic teacher developed assessments, that will allow for more complete and reliable student growth indicators to be a part of teacher’s professional growth and evaluation. “This detailed information about student academic growth should be used instead of Academic Growth Over Time scores or any other measurements based on a single test, as teachers and administrators seek to use data to inform best practices that will improve student achievement,” the resolution states. Academic Growth Over Time is a method of examining the impact of schools and educators on student learning outcomes and uses a value-added method that “controls external...